CarolinaEast working to move graves at construction site

Two unmarked graveyards with occupants who were buried there as long ago as 1818 stand along the northwest corner of the property the hospital leases from the county.

Bill Hand BillHandNBSJ

Like the dying Mercutio giving Shakespeare’s saddest pun, soon you will find CarolinaEast Medical Center a “grave place.”No, they’re not killing patients. But within a couple of days when officials turn the earth for the new cancer center’s groundbreaking, specialists will arrive to find old graves at the site and remove their occupants.Two unmarked graveyards with occupants who were buried there as long ago as 1818 stand along the northwest corner of the property the hospital leases from the county, and public relations director Megan McGarvey says it is important that any human remains are found and reinterred.“Even if it’s just one little piece, it deserves to be respectfully reinterred,” she said.Those graves — from an old family graveyard and from the old Craven County Poor House at the site — are located along the edges of a parking lot and the street it lines, Health Drive.Most of the construction for the cancer center will take place at that end of the property and, while the new building won’t extend to the old graveyards, the parking areas there will be altered, necessitating the removal of any human remains.The hospital recently ran a legal notice in the Sun Journal seeking anyone with information about the graves or the next-of-kin to contact Legacy Research Associates at 919-215-6469. So far, no one has stepped forward, according to archaeologist Deborah Joy of Legacy Research, which means hospital officials and strangers will be tasked with making the final arrangements for a long-deceased group of New Bernians whose identities have been long forgotten.

Familiar situationThe cemeteries at the hospital are not new discoveries, and remains from them have been reinterred before.Nor are reinterments brought about by construction projects unusual.“As old as this area is, this happens all the time,” according to Daniel McRoy, project coordinator with CarolinaEast.In 1983 and ’84, construction necessitated an archeological dig that found 22 unmarked graves and the marked grave of John Spence West, who was buried in 1818. The remains — as well as West’s memorial — were moved to New Bern Memorial Cemetery off Chelsea Road.The marked grave memorial, a roughly 2-foot-by-6-foot stone marker, also was moved. Its original location on the hospital grounds is still marked — at one corner of the parking lot a bit of white fabric ribbon is secured to the pavement with a nail.According to Leslie Allen, vice president of facilities and safety at CarolinaEast, Legacy Research Associates of Durham was hired to research the cemeteries and to search for possible graves. Using a Geophysical Survey Systems device, the company searched the grounds using pulses and electromagnetic energy fired into the ground to search for anomalies that suggest gravesites.“She used the ground-penetrating radar to find anomalies in the dirt,” McRoy said. “We have those anomalies, so a controlled grave site excavation will be done.”Any bodies that are found will likely be in the form of a few bones, McRoy said. There is no way of knowing how many are there, but “personally I don’t expect more than four or five.”The hospital will have an official groundbreaking for its cancer center project later in January, McRoy said, and the search for gravesites will begin within a day or two after.Some blacktop will be removed, as will the topsoil in the area along a portion of Health Drive. Ward Cemetery Services of Rocky Mount will then spend two or three days finding the graves and disinterring any remains. Craven County Health Director Scott Harrelson will then be in charge of reinterring the remains at New Bern Memorial Cemetery, where the remains from 1984 are buried.

Old site, many usesJohn Spence West — the references to him always include his middle name — was a plantation owner who, according to a eulogy printed in the Newbern (as New Bern was spelled at the time) Sentinel in February 1819, had a sinner-saved-by-grace story: “From his early associations, his course of reading, and, from witnessing the pitiful contentions, and immoral lives of professors, he had been led into sentiments of scepticism (sic) and infidelity,” it read.But West became devout and, when he died a hard death of sickness or disease at age 52 in December 1818, he willed that 47 acres of property be sold to Craven County for $1 to be used to build a home for the indigent and poor.Because the poor house was raised on the same property, unmarked paupers’ graves were dug in the same area as the family cemetery.The idea of a poor house went back to West’s days of “sceptisism” and infidelity. The state assembly approved a lottery to build “a house for the reception of the poor in Craven County” in 1787 placing such notables as Richard Dobbs Spaight, signer of the Constitution, John Wright Stanly, a privateer who helped fund the American Revolution, and John Hawkes, the architect who built Tryon Palace, to manage the event.Newspaper searches show up occasional notes and clues to the poor house’s existence — an article noting construction of one in 1848, the superintendent of the Poor House handing over an infant child to the county after its unmarried mother, Nilley Morgan, died in 1887; the Rev. Drury Hoge making visits in 1835.Officially it was renamed the Craven County Home for the Aged and Indigent — or, for those with shortness of breath, simply “the County Home” by the 1890s, though newspapers would continue to refer to it as the “poor house” for the next decade or so.A 1901 article about the county budget mentions pay of $3.50 monthly to Merrit Whitley “for burial of County paupers,” Archbell & Co. receiving $125.41 for a month’s supply of food, and Mrs. Fannie Williams’ monthly salary of $20 as keeper of the home.A 1903 article about a fire, in which one inmate died, gave some description of the two-story county dormitories of the home: “... The buildings on the place forming a rectangle with an open court in the centre.”An entry about the poor house that’s included in the “North Carolina Board of Public Charities Reports from 1889-1890” further describes the campus as having “seven buildings, 12 by 12 feet to 32 by 32 feet,” with seven rooms each. The buildings were heated by wood fires in open fireplaces, and there were no protections from fire, the report states.The facility could accommodate 75 people, although the report states only 21 people — “none able to work; 12 helpless; no involuntary inmates” — were living there at the time of the 1889-1890 report.According to historian Victor Jones, of the Craven County Library’s Kellenberger Room, the home remained in place until 1965, when it came under private owners as the Williams & West Memorial Home.Currently, the PruittHealth home stands in the same area, and over part of the former graveyard.Jones noted that the poor house that West inspired ultimately developed into the Craven County Health Department.

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